Friday, February 17, 2017

Finding Hope When Nothing’s Working

Sliding into a depression is ugly. Enduring
anxiety can feel an infernal torment. And a double-whammy is overwhelming. Being
overwhelmed gives me, at least, the impression that nothing’s working; that
everything in life is crashing and burning. Logically it’s not that way at all,
but we can get to the point where it feels
like this.

There’s always a lot of inner
dialogue going on whenever I’m feeling overwhelmed. Although awareness is usually
a Godsend, knowing that it’s the noise within my own head, however, doesn’t
help me much. In fact, the more conscious I am of it, the more overwhelmed I
can feel.

When we can’t get out of our own
minds there are a few avenues we can slide down — panic, at one end of the
spectrum, for one; despair, at the other end of the spectrum, for another.

Somehow, we need to find hope,
because hope opens the door to joy and eventually peace. Hope also encourages
us to apply faith. Hope infills panic with calm, and it augments despair with
patience.

I’ve found that when my mind is
obsessing about overwhelming matters I need healthy diversions of focus. The
best of these is connection through sharing vulnerably with caring others.
Provided we have these people in our lives, and we utilise them, these connections
give us the ability to share honestly and receive the encouragement of
reassurance. They balance our negative self-talk with encouraging truths we
need to hear.

On a practical level, knowing we
need healthy diversions of focus is one thing; achieving same is clearly
another thing altogether. It can feel an impossibility to do. If nothing else,
if you’re reading these words, please know you have someone (among the many who
do) who understands how confounding it is.

It’s encouraging when we know there
are others, too, who suffer for having no simple way of negotiating such confused
messes.

But this is a real hope:

When we believe in the power of sharing
honestly with caring others
we find those people help relieve our burdens.

In addition, when we trust someone
who cares for us with our struggles,
those struggles diminish
and our minds and hearts are helped.

And if we ever feel we’ve
overburdened people with our problems, we can try to find a few equally caring people
who we can spread the load with.